The exuberance and hopeful details in the first half of Casa Guidi are presented so cinematically – I read it almost like a storyboard with a balanced set of distant and close-up shots engineered to present an artistic immersion in the moment not present to any one set of actual eyes but available only through EBB’s creative gaze (realer than real). What is seen (“And all the thousand windows which had cast / A ripple of silks, in blue and scarlet down” 478-479) beside what is seen only be the poet and reader (“The first torch of Italian freedom, lit / To toss in the next tiger’s face who should / Approach too near them in a greedy fit,--” 465-466).
Reading the poem as something I might teach (in excerpt) and keeping in mind the day’s post-colonial frame, I was struck by the historically unique and yet still universal yearning for admirable and trustworthy leadership in the passage from lines 758-775:
What ye want is light--indeed
Not sunlight--(ye may well look up surprised
To those unfathomable heavens that feed
Your purple hills)--but God's light organized
In some high soul, crowned capable to lead
The conscious people, conscious and advised,--
For if we lift a people like mere clay,
It falls the same. We want thee, O unfound
And sovran teacher! if thy beard be grey
Or black, we bid thee rise up from the ground
And speak the word God giveth thee to say,
Inspiring into all this people round,
Instead of passion, thought, which pioneers
All generous passion, purifies from sin,
And strikes the hour for. Rise up, teacher! here's
A crowd to make a nation!--best begin
By making each a man, till all be peers
Of earth's true patriots and pure martyrs in
Knowing and daring.
This is political, but it is also accessible and universal, and in our hyperironic, hyperskeptical contemporary time sounds almost ignorant – but a genuine dream that a leader would emerge both worthy of the nation’s people and able to somehow extend their grasp beyond the current reach. Without getting too political, I think there was something of that in the 2008 inauguration of Barack Obama… regardless of your political leanings you had a momentary sensation that this moment could be a genuine opportunity for a shared step forward. Reading the poem through that lens, for many that wept openly on that evening there was also the obvious sensation that people whose rights had been limited, whose enfranchisement had been long denied, at last had a voice and a leader who knew their needs and shared their prayers.
From an educational point of view I was also intrigued by the notion that Browning’s idealized leader inspires not passion, which can be unruly and excuse bloodshed and hatred in the name of zeal, but thought. The concept of a great leader being, at base, a teacher who transforms a crowd into a nation, who restricts their darker desires and channels their more noble impulses is again almost too profoundly optimistic and hopeful for contemporary ears.
The exuberance and hopeful details in the first half of Casa Guidi are presented so cinematically – I read it almost like a storyboard with a balanced set of distant and close-up shots engineered to present an artistic immersion in the moment not present to any one set of actual eyes but available only through EBB’s creative gaze (realer than real). What is seen (“And all the thousand windows which had cast / A ripple of silks, in blue and scarlet down” 478-479) beside what is seen only be the poet and reader (“The first torch of Italian freedom, lit / To toss in the next tiger’s face who should / Approach too near them in a greedy fit,--” 465-466).
Reading the poem as something I might teach (in excerpt) and keeping in mind the day’s post-colonial frame, I was struck by the historically unique and yet still universal yearning for admirable and trustworthy leadership in the passage from lines 758-775:
What ye want is light--indeed
Not sunlight--(ye may well look up surprised
To those unfathomable heavens that feed
Your purple hills)--but God's light organized
In some high soul, crowned capable to lead
The conscious people, conscious and advised,--
For if we lift a people like mere clay,
It falls the same. We want thee, O unfound
And sovran teacher! if thy beard be grey
Or black, we bid thee rise up from the ground
And speak the word God giveth thee to say,
Inspiring into all this people round,
Instead of passion, thought, which pioneers
All generous passion, purifies from sin,
And strikes the hour for. Rise up, teacher! here's
A crowd to make a nation!--best begin
By making each a man, till all be peers
Of earth's true patriots and pure martyrs in
Knowing and daring.
This is political, but it is also accessible and universal, and in our hyperironic, hyperskeptical contemporary time sounds almost ignorant – but a genuine dream that a leader would emerge both worthy of the nation’s people and able to somehow extend their grasp beyond the current reach. Without getting too political, I think there was something of that in the 2008 inauguration of Barack Obama… regardless of your political leanings you had a momentary sensation that this moment could be a genuine opportunity for a shared step forward. Reading the poem through that lens, for many that wept openly on that evening there was also the obvious sensation that people whose rights had been limited, whose enfranchisement had been long denied, at last had a voice and a leader who knew their needs and shared their prayers.
From an educational point of view I was also intrigued by the notion that Browning’s idealized leader inspires not passion, which can be unruly and excuse bloodshed and hatred in the name of zeal, but thought. The concept of a great leader being, at base, a teacher who transforms a crowd into a nation, who restricts their darker desires and channels their more noble impulses is again almost too profoundly optimistic and hopeful for contemporary ears.